Examples Of The Han Dynasty Art Alien Motif

This thesis is divided into seven chapters, each of them traces the origins or prototypes of one or several related motifs in the Han tomb reliefs, ranging from the frontal chariot, the frontal horse, the single-headed and double-bodied monster, etc. It argues that although some of the motifs' schemes could be discerned however vaguely or clearly in the Zou or Shang art, their immediate inspirations came from the Western or the Steppes sources.The paper is only a "morsel" of the project I am working on, its aim is, by exploring case by case the motifs probably adopted by the Han Art from the foreign sources, to re-examine the foundation on which the current Han Art scholarship is developing.